'Brave Detective 5' revealed the full story of a murder case surrounding a famous web novel writer.
On the 3rd episode of Brave Detective 5 (directed by Lee Ji-seon), which aired on T-cast E Channel on the 10th, Detective Lee Dong-hee of the Busanjin Police Station phishing crime investigation team, Detective Seo Bu-hee of the violent crimes team 4, and former commissioner general Yoon Oe-chul and officer Kim Jin Soo from the Korea Crime Scene Investigation (KCSI) appeared and revealed the investigation log of cases they directly solved.
On the broadcast that day, Kwak Sun-young said before introducing the case, "It turned out the victim was a famous web novel writer who had posted several works online," and added, "It is a truly heartbreaking and tragic case." The case began in 2019 when a woman called to report, saying, "My close older sister cannot be reached and did not go to work," and asking the police to go to the house with her.
The older sister's home was a luxury APT. equipped with a thorough security system. When the police opened the door and entered, they found the victim dead by hanging in the master bathroom bathtub. However, the condition of the body made it difficult to conclude it was a simple suicide. There were bruises all over the body and injuries on the knees. The investigation team began to suspect homicide. The victim was a woman in her 30s who had recently moved into the APT. to live with her parents. The caller said she felt something was wrong because the victim had never changed the home password but it had been changed. Also, the day before the incident the victim posted an ad to sell a sofa on a secondhand trading site, and contact was lost after a message that the buyer was at the house.
Apartment visit records showed that among those who visited the victim's home on the day of the victim's last contact, there was an unidentified man in his 20s, and it was revealed that the man had additionally visited the APT. the day before and the day of the transaction.
CCTV analysis confirmed a scene in which the man received a vehicle on a road near the victim's house. Based on the vehicle color, investigators tracked the route through the local government control center and the traffic center operations room and discovered the vehicle was a rental. The rental car renter was a 21-year-old Mr. Kim (alias) with two prior convictions, and Kim was arrested through the rental car's GPS records. In the bag he was carrying, the victim's mobile phone, card key and APT. contract were found. Ahn Jung-hwan said, "I lost my mind," in anger. But Kim claimed he did not know why the victim's phone was in the bag and said he had taken the APT. contract as a substitute notepad.
Later Kim admitted to the crime, testifying that because the sofa was priced at 2.3 million won and he asked for it to be reduced to 1.8 million won, the victim suddenly criticized his parents, making him angry and leading him to assault her, and that when the anger did not subside he stepped on her neck and she died. But before the transaction, the perpetrator's account balance was only 40,000 won, showing he had no real intention to buy the sofa. Kim transferred 1 million won from the victim's account in four installments at her house, and it was confirmed he later transferred or received cash advances totaling 32 million won.
More shocking was his actions immediately after the crime. Kim went on a date with his girlfriend, treated his girlfriend's parents to a meal, and even went to a luxury outlet, leaving everyone baffled. Kim had been unemployed for two months before the crime, had squandered his savings and had borrowed only 10 million won from more than 10 private lenders. He was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of robbery and murder. Kim's sister hired a lawyer and deposited a bond with the bereaved family, but that money was also revealed to have been transferred from the victim's account, provoking public outrage.
The case introduced by KCSI began in 2014 when a man in his 60s came to the police station and reported a missing person, saying his 70-year-old older brother who lived alone could not be reached and his mobile phone was turned off. The missing person had been living alone after a divorce two months earlier and had been in contact with his younger brother almost daily. However, contact was lost and he could not be found at his residence.
Among the missing person's notebooks, a phone number for a self-defense products agency was found. The younger brother said his older brother had been constantly anxious since being kidnapped 10 months earlier. In the past the missing person had been suddenly kidnapped while walking and forcibly hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital, and the younger brother filed a lawsuit that led to a release order after three months. The missing person's wife was behind the case. She had forcibly hospitalized her husband claiming he had morbid jealousy and mental illness, and the two later divorced. In particular, after his release the house under the missing person's name was transferred, and his private taxi license was canceled while he was hospitalized, raising further suspicion. The missing person owned a building worth about 2.5 billion won, but at the wife's request the title was transferred.
The wife was questioned as a witness, and her alibi was perfect for the time the missing person's phone was turned off. She had long claimed her husband drank and assaulted her, and the children told the same story. An application for a search warrant to check the wife's communication and financial transaction records was denied for lack of evidence. Further inquiries continued but no witnesses appeared.
One year after the incident, the violent crimes team at the police station received an important tip from someone claiming to know details of the missing 70-year-old man's case. The tipster said he had heard the perpetrators describe the crime process while incarcerated in prison and, after being released, had seen an article by chance and realized it was a real case. The inmates were suspects who had already been questioned several times for kidnapping charges, and they denied the crimes.
But after conflicts, an accomplice who was a subordinate claimed the ringleader had been commissioned and that he had only carried out the kidnapping. To find who commissioned them, investigators seized mobile phones among the detained items for forensic analysis and found several photos taken around the missing person's house and identified frequent call contacts before and after the kidnapping. The frequent contact was an employee of a private ambulance center who had ties to the missing person's wife. When the missing person was forcibly hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital, the ambulance center employee had been involved, and it was confirmed 20 million won had been handed over.
Later the missing person's wife denied ordering a murder, admitting she had paid 50 million won to commission something but claiming she had asked only that her husband be put somewhere he could never get out of. The ambulance center employee interpreted that as an order to kill, instructed the contractors accordingly, and the victim was killed two hours after the kidnapping. The wife blamed her husband's past violence and refused to disclose why she transferred property titles. The body was found on a mountain, and forensic analysis by the National Forensic Service confirmed it was the missing person.
The missing person's wife and the ambulance center employee were each sentenced to 15 years in prison, and additional crimes by the contractors came to light during trial. It emerged they killed a man in his 40s leaving a psychiatric hospital after alcohol dependence treatment by injecting a sedative and then burying him clandestinely, and they had planned crimes targeting psychiatric patients who appeared to have no relatives but had property. The ringleader was sentenced to life imprisonment and the subordinate to 24 years in prison.
Meanwhile, Brave Detective 5 airs every Friday at 9:50 p.m., and is available on major OTT services including Netflix, TVING and wavve. Viewers can also find vivid news and videos about the program on E Channel's official YouTube and Instagram. In addition, the E Channel original web variety show series 'Hyeongsuda,' which expands the Brave Detective universe, covers behind-the-scenes stories of the detectives' investigations, violent case behinds and true stories of Korean death row inmates who were actually executed, and is released every Friday at 7 p.m. on the YouTube channel 'Detectives' Chat.'<
[Photo] E Channel
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